“Have you never read?” Last time we discovered, through Mark’s ingenious literary links, that Jesus, the Son of Man, is ready to do miracles for us. He has authority on earth to forgive sins! Praise God for that! He miraculously heals our spiritual paralysis so we can walk in obedience to His commands. Mark also identifies Son of Man as Lord of the Sabbath. As Lord, Jesus opens our eyes to the Bible, not to see rules and regulations as the Pharisees did, but to see Himself. Jesus also gives us sabbath, the rest of satisfying fresh bread for our labors in the Bible—“plucking heads of grain.” So draw near to Jesus, the Son of Man who ascended with the clouds of heaven to the throne. In full assurance of faith trust your forever High Priest to miraculously transform your heads of grain into fresh baked bread. He’ll do it!
This bread from high priest to David story presents yet one more exciting aspect of our relationship with the living God. It’s a perfect complement to our Scripture reading. There’s more to this bread in God’s heart and mind than meets the eye! But before we can relish what these passages will yield, there’s a problem with our David story we have to grapple with. You may not have noticed it. This hang-up requires a lot of what a spiritual mentor of mine calls “donkey work” to sift through. We have to labor a bit through what’s not quite so fun in order to grasp Jesus Christ more fully as the Lord of the Sabbath. Patience will pay off in the end though. By removing the mental barriers, you’ll be introduced to a thrilling relational dynamic with God that Mark has crafted.
One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?”
Mark 2:23-26 ESV
See that reference to Abiathar the high priest? Mark alone draws attention to Abiathar. Matthew and Luke omit him in their versions. In fact, this is its only reference in the New Testament. Mark’s inclusion of Abiathar surprised me with its implications.
Some commentators claim that Abiathar here is a “historical mistake.” To see why, let’s visit the story in its original setting in 1 Samuel.
Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you?” And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, ‘Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.’ I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place. Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.”
1 Samuel 21:1-3 ESV
See, there you go. 1 Samuel 21 clearly says Ahimelech is the priest, not Abiathar. Abiathar is the son of Ahimelech, 1 Samuel 22:20 says. Poor, sloppy Mark. He messed it up! Obviously he didn’t know his Hebrew Bible very well.
Well, hold on a minute. Let’s take a step back and consider the Gospel of Mark as a whole. Mark didn’t just slap a bunch of cool Jesus stories together, joining them with and’s and then’s. The more I study Mark’s Gospel, the more I am stunned by his mastery of the Hebrew Bible! He’s a very careful reader of it. Through his liberality with literary devices Mark ingeniously interweaves the Old Testament into the tapestry of his Jesus presentation. Sloppiness is not Mark. This is what I think: scribes are often befuddled by the virtuoso. Wisdom is learning from the master. Correcting Mark is like correcting Leonardo da Vinci by adding our brushstrokes to the Mona Lisa.
So is Abiathar here a “historical mistake”? Or is there a plausible explanation? Unhesitatingly I say yes. It’s a beautifully, carefully crafted literary design to deepen and beautify our seeing Jesus as the Son of Man! So why is Jesus, whom Mark quotes, doing this?
Let’s start off with a little Greek grammar puzzle, shall we? David “entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest.” “In the time of” is an interpretation of super common epi (ep-ee’), which usually means above or upon. I was baffled at first by epi here. “Upon” Abiathar the high priest? Whatever does that mean? I was helped by a commentator who drew attention to Mark 12:26: “And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush [epi tou batau], how God spoke to him…” Here the ESV translates epi as “in the passage about” rather than “in the time of.” So it’s a Greek idiom. It’s very clear here that epi identifies Exodus 3 passage of the iconic burning bush.
A good Bible study principle is to understand what’s unclear by what’s clear. So Mark’s use of epi draws attention to the passage or passages about Abiathar. The conundrum for Bible commentators and translators alike is that Ahimelech appears in the 1 Samuel 21 passage, not Abiathar. The ESV, perhaps to help Mark save face from his “historical mistake,” interprets epi as “in the time of” instead of “in the passage about.” Our donkey work now takes us down a roundabout way, but trust me, there’s a huge reward at the end. This apparent historical blunder actually is a wonder to dazzle us with Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath.
I’ve come to realize only in the last year that so many of my hang-ups in cases like this have been due to the cultural chasm between Hebrew thinking and Greek thinking. And I do mean chasm. The realization of it shocked me like a polar plunge into icy waters. I didn’t even know this immense gap existed until I read an astute book by Thorleif Boman called Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek. Phenomenal! This was the most mentally taxing book I’ve read in a decade, maybe two, but it transported me into the mind of these ancient Hebrews. The world—and especially the world of the Bible—came alive! And what I’d had hang-ups with before began to finally make sense.
I’d always assumed that understanding Hebrew was simply pulling out the lexicon and figuring out the right English word or idiom. Since I know some Spanish (un poco), that’s how it works there. What I discovered, though, is the Hebrews envisioned their world radically different than the Greeks. And it was the Greeks who profoundly shaped modern Western civilization’s envisioning of everything around us. Guess what? We see the Hebrew-shaped Bible with those Greek glasses on, and that causes problems for us at times. Like with Abiathar. Remember, Jesus and Mark being Jews thought like Hebrews. Recognizing the cultural chasm of how the Hebrews thought of names and how we, as Greek-shaped thinkers do, can remedy what seems a historical mistake.
For the longest time I got torqued inside in a few instances by the way the Hebrew Bible used names. It really bothered me. Take this one, for example. “And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (Ezek 34:23). So when Ezekiel prophesied of David, did he mean David resurrected from the dead? The context seems like he intends the Messiah, that greater son of David—Jesus. Or how about this one? When Malachi prophesied that Elijah would come before the Messiah, did he mean the Elijah we know and love from 1 Kings? Yet the New Testament reintroduces Elijah as John the Baptist. This is but the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s the deal. One aspect of the cultural chasm between Hebrew and Greek thinking is this: Hebrews think function whereas Greeks think appearance. To us, a name uniquely identifies one person. It’s a one-to-one mapping. That’s how it looks, its appearance. David means the David who slew Goliath, wrote psalms, and became Israel’s greatest king. That’s how we think of that name. In Hebrew, however, though a name obviously signifies the person, they also think of it in terms of function. This they do with a fluidity that bends our brain to track with. A name to them is more like what we might think of as a persona, one composite personality of multiple people sharing similar traits or characteristics. So in Ezekiel’s case, David is not David, son of Jesse, but Jesus, a functioning David persona of those good qualities that made him Israel’s greatest king.
A name to the Hebrew is like a freight train that, as it moves forward in the biblical storyline, picks up more and more cargo that deepens its significance and meaning. We get this concept in names of places. Take Egypt, for example. As the train picks up freight at each stop—Abraham and Sarah to Egypt, Joseph to Egypt, the exodus from Egypt—the name “Egypt” grows in our imagination as a symbol bristling with meaning. Function. “Egypt” is shorthand for a type of the world. We Greek-shaped thinkers get this because Egypt is the same geographical location. Appearance. Names, however, don’t have that same continuity. People die and their name ends with them. But, in the mind of the Hebrew, the theological freight concept is very much alive when it comes to names of characters. The name is a persona loading up meaning as it moves forward in the biblical storyline.
So when Malachi speaks of Elijah the prophet’s return, that fulfillment in the persona of Elijah manifests again in another, John the Baptist. Those defining characteristics of Elijah the mighty prophet live on in a new Elijah. It’s the Hebrew way of thinking in terms of function, not appearance. The biblical authors loved to leverage names in wordplays and puns. Huram, the master artisan who crafted much of Solomon’s temple, is also called Hiram, the king who sent him. Genealogies are definitely fair game. Matthew superimposes Asaph the psalmist upon Asa (Mt 1:7-8) and Amos the prophet on Amon (1:10). What offends our Greek-influenced sensibilities is for a Hebrew thinker just a playfulness with personas that express theology.
Let’s return now to our story of interest with Abiathar the high priest. Abiathar is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name ʼEbyâthâr (ab-yaw-thawr’), ‘āḇ (awb) meaning father and yāṯar (yaw-thar’), to abound, to be over and above, to be left, to be beyond measure, to exceed bounds, as per Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon. Yāṯar implies such an abundance there’s a lot left over. So Abiathar means “father of abundance” or “father of generosity.” Watch how the meaning of Abiathar’s name contributes to his persona.
“Father of abundance” fits Mark’s context. David goes into the house of God and obtains bread from the high priest, “father of abundance,” for the men with him. Jesus, as we explored last time, is the true high priest. Jesus as our high priest ascended into the heavenly house of God and now is a “father of abundance” to us! Jesus is called “everlasting father” in Isaiah 9. The divine Son’s unity with the Father associate these father titles to Him. “I and the Father,” Jesus asserted, “are one” (Jn 10:30). Jesus, by using Abiathar and not Ahimelech, brings into play this rich expectation of Jesus as father of abundance. He is not stingy or miserly. If you examine passages pertaining to Jesus’ ascension, the common denominator is abundance to His people. Case in point: “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing” (Acts 2:33).
Last time we showed how Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath gives you and I the bread of the Presence in exchange for our laboring in the Bible as heads of grain. When we add the Abiathar persona into the mix, Jesus, father of generosity, abundantly gives us bread as the fruit of our Bible labors! Bread in the hands of Jesus, the true High Priest, brims over with miraculous multiplication. So, too, with the heads of grain plucked from Scripture that we entrust Him with. There’s more. Abiathar’s history with David supercharges the persona even more. Let’s take a look.
When did Abiathar become the high priest anyway? Abiathar was present at the time of David’s arrival at Nob. At that snapshot in time, his father Ahimelech was the high priest. The city of Nob, tabernacle headquarters, was close to where King Saul was. After Doeg the Edomite rushes to tattle on David, King Saul, enviously hunting David, quickly comes to Nob. It’s a short time span, perhaps days. Ahimelech, 85 priests, and the whole city of Nob perish under Saul’s rage. Abiathar, however, escaped (1 Samuel 22:20). When Ahimelech died, his son Abiathar was next in line to become high priest. When we see Abiathar operating with the ephod shortly thereafter, that’s proof of his functioning in the role of high priest.
How did Abiathar know to flee? 1 Samuel hints at the high priest’s relationship to the ephod.
David knew that Saul was plotting harm against him. And he said to Abiathar the priest, “Bring the ephod here.” Then David said, “O Lord, the God of Israel, your servant has surely heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah, to destroy the city on my account. Will the men of Keilah surrender me into his hand? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O Lord, the God of Israel, please tell your servant.” And the Lord said, “He will come down.” Then David said, “Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?” And the Lord said, “They will surrender you.”
1 Samuel 23:9-12 ESV
Did you ever wonder how David knew he could summon Abiathar to bring the ephod and hear God’s voice for counsel? I mean, all of a sudden, David just starts using the ephod that way. Perhaps Abiathar used the ephod to discern King Saul’s murderous intent coming to Nob. Obviously Abiathar thought the ephod was valuable enough to take with him during his escape.
Citing Abiathar as high priest when technically his father Ahimelech was high priest does something. It extends the history of the high priest beyond the Ahimelech’s death. Abiathar has a continuing history with David that contributes to the Abiathar persona. Ahimelech gave David the loaves in the house of God, the bread of the Presence. The heart of generosity Abiathar’s father exhibits toward David in giving him bread is the same persona of Abiathar. This is in line with Hebrew thinking of names as function, as personas. I will say that this is the only instance I can think of where a later historical persona is retrofitted onto an earlier one. But Mark does some amazingly unique things with his design patterns I’ve not seen other biblical authors do.
What the Abiathar persona does is add David’s ability to hear the voice of God. “And the Lord said, ‘He will come down.’” “And the Lord said, ‘They will surrender you.’” These look like gifts of the Spirit such as a word of knowledge or a word of wisdom that 1 Corinthians 12 speaks of. They’re communications of the mind of God about things that He knows for preservation and life. And just like the gifts of the Spirit are for the corporate good, so too were these words to David. They not only preserved David’s life but all the men with him. This parallels the bread of the Presence, whom David ate as well as his men.
Had Jesus said Ahimelech the high priest, we’d have missed out on the continuance of Abiathar with David and its “bread” associations. Abiathar also gave bread, but not the physical kind. There’s the physical bread his father Ahimelech gave to David but there’s also the spiritual bread Abiathar gave to David—God’s voice! Abiathar gave David “bread” of the living voice of Yahweh! “…Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deut 8:3 CSB). I believe this is Mark’s point. As wonderful and crucial it is to read Scripture, that’s not all. We need to hear God’s living voice too. “Historical correctness” of Ahimelech in Mark’s passage would have truncated the living voice of God that the Abiathar persona exemplifies. Mark didn’t want to limit that bread to just those five loaves that Ahimelech gave to David. He wanted to encompass a bread that was better expressed by Abiathar. The bread of the Presence is united with the voice of the Presence. We innately know this to be true. David’s Shepherd stated plainly, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (Jn 10:27).
So the Abiathar persona that incorporates Ahimelech serves as a pattern we see filled full by Jesus. In Jesus, the Lord of Sabbath, we see hints of the Trinity! Of course, we have Jesus, the divine Son in full view. “Father of abundance” manifests the large-heartedness of the heavenly Father. Our access to the living voice of God points to the ministry of the Holy Spirit. All the Trinity is implied in the compact, beautiful story that Mark is drawing our attention to. In Jesus dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The Father freely gives all things to the Son. The Son, in turn, gives all things freely to us. That’s what it means for Jesus to be Lord of the Sabbath. Let’s trust Him to be just that to us. Each day. Right now.
There’s yet one more Easter egg hidden away in this house of God where David got bread. It will blow your socks off!! It’s mind-blowing how Mark uses it to superimpose a Hallelujah chorus resounding with triumphant strains upon a seemingly quiet fact about Jesus’s death. I’m so jazzed; I can’t wait to share it for next time (hopefully by Resurrection Sunday)!
Glory Unveiled: Discovering Jesus 